I accepted the invitation and I walked up and
down there, quarter-deck fashion, a matter of a couple of hours; now and
then looking up at the weathercock as I might have looked up aloft; and
now and then taking a look into Cornhill, as I might have taken a look
over the side.
All dinner-time, and all after dinner-time, we talked it over again. I
gave him my views of his plan, and he very much approved of the same. I
told him I had nearly decided, but not quite. "Well, well," says he,
"come down to Liverpool to-morrow with me, and see the Golden Mary." I
liked the name (her name was Mary, and she was golden, if golden stands
for good), so I began to feel that it was almost done when I said I would
go to Liverpool. On the next morning but one we were on board the Golden
Mary. I might have known, from his asking me to come down and see her,
what she was. I declare her to have been the completest and most
exquisite Beauty that ever I set my eyes upon.
We had inspected every timber in her, and had come back to the gangway to
go ashore from the dock-basin, when I put out my hand to my friend.
"Touch upon it," says I, "and touch heartily. I take command of this
ship, and I am hers and yours, if I can get John Steadiman for my chief
mate."
John Steadiman had sailed with me four voyages. The first voyage John
was third mate out to China, and came home second. The other three
voyages he was my first officer. At this time of chartering the Golden
Mary, he was aged thirty-two. A brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very
neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and
never in it, a face that pleased everybody and that all children took to,
a habit of going about singing as cheerily as a blackbird, and a perfect
sailor.
We were in one of those Liverpool hackney-coaches in less than a minute,
and we cruised about in her upwards of three hours, looking for John.
John had come home from Van Diemen's Land barely a month before, and I
had heard of him as taking a frisk in Liverpool. We asked after him,
among many other places, at the two boarding-houses he was fondest of,
and we found he had had a week's spell at each of them; but, he had gone
here and gone there, and had set off "to lay out on the main-to'-gallant-
yard of the highest Welsh mountain" (so he had told the people of the
house), and where he might be then, or when he might come back, nobody
could tell us. But it was surprising, to be sure, to see how every face
brightened the moment there was mention made of the name of Mr.
Steadiman.
We were taken aback at meeting with no better luck, and we had wore ship
and put her head for my friends, when as we were jogging through the
streets, I clap my eyes on John himself coming out of a toyshop! He was
carrying a little boy, and conducting two uncommon pretty women to their
coach, and he told me afterwards that he had never in his life seen one
of the three before, but that he was so taken with them on looking in at
the toyshop while they were buying the child a cranky Noah's Ark, very
much down by the head, that he had gone in and asked the ladies'
permission to treat him to a tolerably correct Cutter there was in the
window, in order that such a handsome boy might not grow up with a
lubberly idea of naval architecture.
We stood off and on until the ladies' coachman began to give way, and
then we hailed John. On his coming aboard of us, I told him, very
gravely, what I had said to my friend. It struck him, as he said
himself, amidships. He was quite shaken by it.
